Tag: Inside the Writers Room (1-9 of 9)

Dec 11 2011 11:49 AM ET

'Saturday Night Live' recap: Host Katy Perry was surprisingly restrained. Matt Damon, Val Kilmer, and Alec Baldwin? Not so much

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katy-perry-snl

Image Credit: Dana Edelson/NBC

The word on the street about last night’s Saturday Night Live was that the show would be all about Katy Perry’s breasts. True, by “the word on the street” I really mean “something Katy Perry said earlier in the week to get people to watch.” But a heavage-heavy show wouldn’t have been a surprising scenario. After all, the last time the pneumatic hit machine appeared on SNL she was treated as something to be squeezed into a too-tight Elmo t-shirt rather than someone who could necessarily be trusted to bring the funny.

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Apr 6 2011 11:27 AM ET

'The Good Wife': The story behind the talking lion

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Honestly, last night’s episode of CBS’ The Good Wife had Alan Cumming’s Eli coming comically unglued and the return of Michael J. Fox’s Louis Canning and Denis O’Hare’s Judge Abernathy, and yet… we’re still obsessed with the talking lion delivering the voice of Titus Welliver’s Glenn Childs to Cary (Matt Czuchry, who may deserve an Emmy nomination for keeping a near straight face). Props again to series creators Robert and Michelle King. “Michelle was given a talking teddy bear speaker phone by her uncle a long time ago; and we always wanted to do a scene involving an intense and intimidating phone conversation over the phone,” Robert tells EW. “Our daughter suggested we give the phone to our Mr. Mom investigator, Wiley. It seemed like a good idea to do this in an episode where we couldn’t get Titus. The only problem is our prop person couldn’t find the phone. So we tried various talking animal toys: and the funniest was the lion from a small Japanese company, Kuchi-Paku. The doll can be attached, as we did, to an actual phone, or an iPod. It’s very funny to play Presidential speeches through it.” Watch the scene again below. And happy Web surfing.  READ FULL STORY »

Mar 31 2011 02:00 AM ET

'Justified': What was in Coover's bag? We've got the answer.

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Justified

You’ve gotta love Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), and you’ve gotta love to hate those Bennett boys, Dickie (Jeremy Davies) and Coover (Brad William Henke). This week, we saw the duo bring a little friend along while trying to intimidate Harlan resident Reggie, and later our beloved Boyd (Walton Goggins, pictured), so they’d halt relations with Black Pike, the mining company Boyd has been helping secure land. Ava (Joelle Carter) put a bullet in the bag, and broke Coover’s heart. “You killed Charlie!” But what was he?  READ FULL STORY »

Nov 4 2010 05:55 PM ET

'Cougar Town' does 'Spaced'-inspired finger gun shootout: Watch!

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If you’re still laughing at Cougar Town‘s episode-ending finger gunfight (and Ellie resurrecting herself from the dead to drink some wine), odds are you will wet yourself when you watch the scenes from Spaced, the British series starring Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes, and Nick Frost, to which it’s paying homage. (You can hear Cougar Town‘s Travis say “I love Spaced” as he falls, but it’s co-creators Kevin Biegel and Bill Lawrence you need to thank: In a joint statement to EW, they admit, “We are both self-proclaimed TV nerds and Spaced is such an awesome show that we wanted to give it a ‘shout-out.’ Plus, it was easier than writing our own joke.”) Watch the Cougar Town and Spaced scenes below. Cougar Town isn’t the first show to whip out the finger guns on American TV — The Office and Psych come to mind — but it was a nice surprise. After Jules’ therapist (Jennifer Aniston) cured her of the nervous tick, we feared they were gone for good. Instead, everyone’s packin’, and the fire is no longer friendly. UPDATE: Pegg has tweeted his approval: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That was always our motto.”

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Sep 29 2010 01:40 PM ET

'The Good Wife': Describe your behavior watching last night's steamy premiere

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the-good-wifeKen Tucker has your critical take on last night’s season 2 premiere of CBS’ The Good Wife. I would like to zero in on your emotional — and physical — responses to two key scenes: The voicemail and the sex. (Watch both below. You’re welcome! UPDATE: Co-creator Robert King talks to us about the latter after the jump.)

Now, I’d read that Eli was going to erase a “swoon-worthy” voicemail from Will on Alicia’s cell.* That little bitty spoiler meant that I was slightly confused when Will left a message saying they should just drop it — she’s married, he’s her boss. But when Will dialed again, I knew it was going to be good. It wasn’t as lengthy a speech as the one Josh Charles delivered on Sports Night when Dan finally got Rebecca (Teri Polo) to go out with him, but that’s what was so disarming. He came right out and said, “I love you.” He admitted he’s probably loved her since Georgetown(!). With that confidence and conviction that was sexy on Dan and sexier on Will, he told her to call him and he’d meet her anywhere to make a plan. Then — and this is when that spoiler had me literally kicking the blanket I was laying under on the couch three times — Will told her to ignore this message if she didn’t feel the same way. They’d pretend it never happened. They’d go back to the way things were. Eli heard the voicemail while Alicia was onstage at the press conference with Peter and deleted it. So all Alicia heard was Will backing down. When I watched that scene again after the episode, I did another three kicks. READ FULL STORY »

Sep 9 2010 04:12 PM ET

Inside the Writers Room: 'The Vampire Diaries' returns, as does some of TV's most satisfying pacing

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vampire-diaries-katherineImage Credit: Annette Brown/The CWThe Vampire Diaries returns tonight with its season 2 premiere (The CW, 8 p.m. ET). If you’re contemplating tuning in for the first time but worry you’ll be lost, read through our catch-up gallery, which has everything you need to know — plus a look ahead from executive producers Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec. You won’t be sorry. This show has the kind of swift, satisfying pacing that makes you want to hug your television, because the writers aren’t afraid to give you answers — they know they’ve got plenty more questions to raise. We asked Williamson and Plec for their secret. Other TV writers take note!

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was your mindset for season 1?
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: It was a conscious decision that we wanted to move the story forward, and we didn’t want to be that show that just offers up 20 questions and no answers. I felt like we kind of latched onto this big huge story when we were sitting in the writers room, and we were doing everything we could to tell it all. If you look at all 22 episodes of the first season as a whole, the first four or five were not so much all of that adrenaline. It was a little more of a girl meeting a guy and thinking he has a secret and trying to figure out what it is about this guy she loves that she doesn’t quite understand. And then she figures out that he’s a vampire. And then we ran those few episodes about the uncovering of the town realizing vampires are back. So what episode was the tomb?
JULIE PLEC: Nine or ten.
KW: Nine or ten was when we actually sort of spit out what Damon’s true agenda was. I feel like once we did that, that’s when it was off and running. That to me is when we entered the sprint race, and every episode was baboom, baboom, baboom.
JP: We started this season saying we can’t do that again, it’s too hard. It makes the stories too hard to break. The sprint is so hard to execute. We tried to slow down in the first episode, and then we read the script, and we’re like, nope, nope, kinda speeds back up. [Laughs] For some reason, we stumbled into a formula that really works for us, which is cliffhanger upon cliffhanger, moment upon moment, big epic game-charging moves, and as much as we — for our own sanity — would like to slow that down a bit, we can’t and we won’t. READ FULL STORY »

Apr 7 2010 09:18 PM ET

'Good Wife' phone call: A producer reveals what Will said that Alicia didn't want him to

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Good-Wife-phoneThere are so many things to dissect in last night’s episode of The Good Wife (check out Ken Tucker’s recap). But naturally, it’s “the phone call” — and specifically, the line Will (Josh Charles) said off-camera that caused Alicia (Julianna Margulies) to respond “Will, don’t say that please” while discussing the post-kiss weird place they’re inhabiting — that I zeroed in on. Since a few of you were also wondering what he said, I asked. According to cocreator Robert King, in their minds, it would be something like this… READ FULL STORY »

Mar 17 2010 03:59 PM ET

'The Good Wife' kiss: A producer reveals what the interrupted 'Are we...' would have been

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SPOILER! I am not proud of how many times I’ve rewound that office scene last night between Will and Alicia. Nor can I believe that I just emailed one of the show’s publicists asking her to find out from one of the exec producers what Will was going to say when Alicia interrupted his “Are we…” line to return his kiss. After watching it for the 10th time, I started wondering if he had a full sentence in mind, or if he just intended to say “Are we [insert nod toward the couch].”

According to Robert King, one of the show’s cocreators, they thought the interrupted line would have been “Are we making a mistake?”

“And as for the nod…well, we’ll leave that to your imaginations,” the rep adds. “Try to stay out of the gutter tho. lol.” READ FULL STORY »

Oct 29 2009 11:34 AM ET

Inside the Writers Room: How Chevy Chase ended up dressed as the Beastmaster on tonight's 'Community'

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community-chase_lEver since we saw that Chevy Chase’s Pierce comes to Annie’s Day of the Dead party dressed as the Beastmaster on tonight’s Community (NBC, 8 p.m. ET), we’ve been wondering how that awesomely bad costume choice was made. So, we phoned the writers of the episode to find out. According to Jon Pollack, who penned the half hour with Tim Hobert, “The joke was that we wanted Pierce to be doing something that he thought the kids would be into — but it was something that actually kids might have been into in the ’80s. The initial idea was Tron, but Disney owns Tron and is making a movie, so we couldn’t use Tron. Then we were like, ‘We need some really weird campy movie from the ’80s,’ and Andrew Guest, one of our writers, was like, Beastmaster. It was such a perfect melding of Pierce kinda being able to be a superhero, ’cause that’s what he is in his mind, and being something that was just probably never that cool.” Chase first saw the script at the table read. His reaction? “‘I’m not takin’ off my shirt!,’ and then he walked out,” Pollack says. “But if you were there close up, his legs looked fantastic.”

Other interesting tidbits about tonight’s costumes after the jump! READ FULL STORY »

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